VA pays out $200M for wrongful deaths

An Iraq War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and a history of drug dependency is found dead on the floor of his room at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles after doctors give him a 30-day supply of the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam and a 15-day supply of methadone.

At the VA in San Diego, an intern fails to remove a central-line catheter in a hospitalized veteran, causing his immediate death.

In San Francisco, a Vietnam veteran is admitted to the VA with a special notation that he is prone to falling. Hospital staff regularly leave him unattended, and the veteran falls five times over two weeks, injuring his head, finger, ribs and left knee. After each fall, VA doctors prescribe escalating doses of narcotic painkillers until he overdoses and is moved to hospice care.

These are some of the deaths that resulted in more than $200 million in wrongful death payments by the Department of Veterans Affairs in the decade after 9/11, according to VA data obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

In that time, CIR found the agency made wrongful death payments to nearly 1,000 grieving families, including 59 in California, ranging from decorated Iraq War veterans who shot or hanged themselves after being turned away from mental health treatment, to Vietnam veterans whose cancerous tumors were identified but allowed to grow, to missed diagnoses, botched surgeries and fatal neglect of elderly veterans.

“It wasn’t about the money, I just thought somebody should be held accountable,” said 86-year-old Doris Street, who received a $135,000 settlement in 2010 as compensation for the 2008 death of her brother, Carl Glaze. The median payment in VA wrongful death cases was $150,000.

Glaze, a World War II veteran, became paralyzed from the neck down when he fell in the bathroom two days after being admitted to a VA nursing home in Grand Island, Neb. He died nine days later at age 84.

“I had asked them not to leave him alone, and then they left him in the bathroom,” she said. “We all get upset when these things happen.”

'Heartbreaking preventable deaths'

In a written response to questions, agency spokeswoman Victoria Dillon said that while “any adverse incident for a veteran within our care is one too many,” the wrongful deaths identified by CIR represented a small fraction of the more than 6 million veterans who seek care from the agency every year.

The agency, Dillon said, is “committed to continuous improvement.” When a death occurs, “we conduct a thorough review to understand what happened, prevent similar incidents in the future, and share lessons learned across the system,” she said.

The revelations come as the department faces intense scrutiny from members of Congress over the number of preventable deaths at VA facilities. The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has scheduled a hearing on preventable deaths for April 9.

In September, the committee held a hearing to examine patient deaths at VA hospitals in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Dallas and Jackson, Miss.